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1 | 25.9.24 | 23:12 |
Otoroku presents a daedal, multifarious set from artist, Patrick Ward, recorded on a bill alongside Moritz von Oswald at Cafe OTO in September 2024.
Ward begins with a deep sub-bass rumble that seems to almost physically rise up out of the floor; a weighty mass that slowly but inexorably draws other sonic fragments into its own gravitational field, quivering and contorting as they orbit around it. The pressure builds, before abruptly the disparate elements coalesce around a single, urgently repeated refrain that snaps and slices in a persistent staccato that appears loaded with meaning but in a language unknown.
This sense of warped and fractured vernacular continues, as stilted, stuttering voices spark and falter amidst the sonic debris tumbling around them; speech untethered from language, language severed from meaning. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that these voices are in fact overladen with significance; an abundance of spoken signs and symbols in a complex lexicon whose implications always remain tantalisingly out of reach.
The voices shift, from an isolated repeated refrain, to multiple raised shouts that become engulfed by a growing wall of distortion that builds and erupts into a scattered and corrupted breakbeat before it too unravels, leaving behind only the gentle buzzing and intimate whirring of unknown apparatus.
Patrick Ward is an artist working within moving image, sound and music in various modes of exhibition, performance and installation. In their music the environment of the sound source, the materiality of recording devices, and the apparatus through which music is shared and heard feature as active sonic figurations. Using iPhone recordings, low-res YouTube rips, warped mixtapes and weak wifi signals Ward embraces the technical limitations of the everyday. Grounded in the sonic explorations of their youth in Sheffield – where they learned to mix jungle records on old belt-drive turntables, obsessively rewatched Fantazia and Rave Nation on static riven VHS tape, and sampled pirate radio using cheap Tandy cassette players – their approach to musique concrète evades the strictures of its institutional heritage by embracing the socio-technics of bass music and sound system culture.
Ward’s music is part of a wider audio-visual practice that explores the human relation to technology. Operating between the gallery, auditorium, stage and club, the work is reassembled and reconstructed: often transcribing audio compositions into visual forms, condensing multi-channel gallery installations to single-screen live performances, or presenting audio works by withholding the image-track of a film. Ward’s recent work focuses on the object and formation of the screen itself as a sonic register through which its more opaque qualities might be articulated. Screens appear as thresholds, frames that mark and delineate space; they capture overlapping and contesting states between waking and sleeping, interior and exterior, attention and distraction.
Ward’s work has been exhibited at galleries including Museum Of Modern Art, Ljubljana; Site Gallery, Sheffield; Centre des arts actuels Skol, Montreal; and Hollybush Gardens, London. Their music has been published by Café Oto as Taku Roku and Otoroku releases and their self-released album Enthusiasm (2020) was described by filmmaker Mike Hoolboom as "like nothing else on Bandcamp. Filled with meticulously detailed cinematic scenes that are forever shifting, it rewards close attention.”
